Chapter One

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent
waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.

It wasn't just that the cave was cold, it wasn't just that it was damp
and smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of
Islington and there wasn't a bus due for two million years.

Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent
could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At
least being lost in space kept you busy.

He was stranded in prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex
sequence of events which had involved him being alternately blown up
and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he ever dreamt
existed, and though his life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he
was still feeling jumpy.

He hadn't been blown up now for five years.

Since he had hardly seen anyone since he and Ford Prefect had parted
company four years previously, he hadn't been insulted in all that
time either.

Except just once.

It had happened on a spring evening about two years previously.

He was returning to his cave just a little after dusk when he became
aware of lights flashing eerily through the clouds. He turned and
stared, with hope suddenly clambering through his heart. Rescue.
Escape. The castaway's impossible dream --- a ship.

And as he watched, as he stared in wonder and excitement, a long
silver ship descended through the warm evening air, quietly, without
fuss, its long legs unlocking in a smooth ballet of technology.

It alighted gently on the ground, and what little hum it had generated
died away, as if lulled by the evening calm.

A ramp extended itself.

Light streamed out.

A tall figure appeared silhouetted in the hatchway. It walked down
the ramp and stood in front of Arthur.

``You're a jerk, Dent,'' it said simply.

It was alien, very alien. It had a peculiar alien tallness, a peculiar
alien flattened head, peculiar slitty little alien eyes, extravagantly
draped golden ropes with a peculiarly alien collar design, and pale
grey-green alien skin which had about it that lustrous shine which
most grey-green faces can only acquire with plenty of exercise and
very expensive soap.

Arthur boggled at it.

It gazed levelly at him.

Arthur's first sensations of hope and trepidation had instantly been
overwhelmed by astonishment, and all sorts of thoughts were battling
for the use of his vocal chords at this moment.

``Whh ...?'' he said.

``Bu ... hu ... uh ...'' he added.

``Ru ... ra ... wah ... who?'' he managed finally to say and lapsed
into a frantic kind of silence. He was feeling the effects of having
not said anything to anybody for as long as he could remember.

The alien creature frowned briefly and consulted what appeared to be
some species of clipboard which he was holding in his thin and spindly
alien hand.

``Arthur Dent?'' it said.

Arthur nodded helplessly.

``Arthur Philip Dent?'' pursued the alien in a kind of efficient yap.

``Er ... er ... yes ... er ... er,'' confirmed Arthur.

``You're a jerk,'' repeated the alien, ``a complete asshole.''

``Er ...''

The creature nodded to itself, made a peculiar alien tick on its
clipboard and turned briskly back towards the ship.

``Er ...'' said Arthur desperately, ``er ...''

``Don't give me that!'' snapped the alien. It marched up the ramp,
through the hatchway and disappeared into the ship. The ship sealed
itself. It started to make a low throbbing hum.

``Er, hey!'' shouted Arthur, and started to run helplessly towards it.

``Wait a minute!'' he called. ``What is this? What? Wait a minute!''

The ship rose, as if shedding its weight like a cloak to the ground,
and hovered briefly. It swept strangely up into the evening sky. It
passed up through the clouds, illuminating them briefly, and then was
gone, leaving Arthur alone in an immensity of land dancing a
helplessly tiny little dance.

He jumped and danced until his legs trembled, and shouted till his
lungs rasped. There was no answer from anyone. There was no one to
hear him or speak to him.

The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the
atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the
very few things there are in the Universe from each other.

Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in
its single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He
was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have
been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at
least keep him on the move.

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --- indeed, is --- one of the
Universe's very small number of immortal beings.

Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it,
but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them,
the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon
him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle
accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise
details of the accident are not important because no one has ever
managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened,
and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both,
trying.

Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some
light jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made
it if it hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done.

To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking
risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just
generally outliving the hell out of everybody.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and
that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when
you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day,
that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you
will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning
technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands
will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long
dark teatime of the soul.

So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at
other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the
Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular.

This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which
would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him
on forever. It was this.

He would insult the Universe.

That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally,
one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his
teeth over) in alphabetical order.

When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the
plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the
number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely
fix them with a steely look and say, ``A man can dream can't he?''

And so he started out. He equipped a spaceship that was built to last
with the computer capable of handling all the data processing involved
in keeping track of the entire population of the known Universe and
working out the horrifically complicated routes involved.

His ship fled through the inner orbits of the Sol star system,
preparing to slingshot round the sun and fling itself out into
interstellar space.

``Computer,'' he said.

``Here,'' yipped the computer.

``Where next?''

``Computing that.''

Wowbagger gazed for a moment at the fantastic jewellery of the night,
the billions of tiny diamond worlds that dusted the infinite darkness
with light. Every one, every single one, was on his itinerary. Most
of them he would be going to millions of times over.

He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting up all the dots in
the sky like a child's numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some
vantage point in the Universe it might be seen to spell a very, very
rude word.

The computer beeped tunelessly to indicate that it had finished its
calculations.

``Folfanga,'' it said. It beeped.

``Fourth world of the Folfanga system,'' it continued. It beeped
again.

``Estimated journey time, three weeks,'' it continued further. It
beeped again.

``There to meet with a small slug,'' it beeped, ``of the genus
A-Rth-Urp-Hil-Ipdenu.''

``I believe,'' it added, after a slight pause during which it beeped,
``that you had decided to call it a brainless prat.''

Wowbagger grunted. He watched the majesty of creation outside his
window for a moment or two.

``I think I'll take a nap,'' he said, and then added, ``what network
areas are we going to be passing through in the next few hours?''

The computer beeped.

``Cosmovid, Thinkpix and Home Brain Box,'' it said, and beeped.

``Any movies I haven't seen thirty thousand times already?''

``No.''

``Uh.''

``There's Angst in Space. You've only seen that thirty-three thousand
five hundred and seventeen times.''

``Wake me for the second reel.''

The computer beeped.

``Sleep well,'' it said.

The ship fled on through the night.

Meanwhile, on Earth, it began to pour with rain and Arthur Dent sat in
his cave and had one of the most truly rotten evenings of his entire
life, thinking of things he could have said to the alien and swatting
flies, who also had a rotten evening.

The next day he made himself a pouch out of rabbit skin because he
thought it would be useful to keep things in.